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New Guides to Bouldering in the Winds, Shuteye Ridge, Yosemite and More

After one visit to the Devil’s Kitchen, Wyoming, Jesse Brown decided to buy a house in the Lander area. Devil’s Kitchen must have a fiendish draw: Daniel Woods and Jamie Emerson of Boulder burned up the roads, driving on many a weekend to join Brown and Collin Horvat in developing the high-quality granite boulders.

The Wind River Mountain Range, Wyoming, piercing the sky with peaks as high as 13,000-plus feet, is known for its stellar alpine climbing and sport climbing. Guess what else it has?

As the new Bouldering in the Wind River Range states: “Climbable granite, gneiss, dolomite or sandstone boulders are found throughout the range.”

Lander-area climbers have been bouldering for over two decades. David Lloyd decided to write the new guidebook two years ago, when he returned from a road trip thinking that local bouldering stacked up well with that at other destinations, and realized that the number of boulder problems in the Lander area had doubled since the last guidebook appeared. (Lander Bouldering Third Edition by Steve Bechtel came out in 2005.)

Lloyd says, “Problems at Devil's Kitchen, the Falcon's Lair, Sweetwater and the Rock Shop rival the best problems at Squamish, Bishop or on the Colorado Front Range.” He wrote the book, he said, because, “I wanted to share these places with boulderers dedicated enough to travel here, to encourage further development, and to let public land managers know that these are areas we highly value.”

• Bouldering in the Wind River Range, by David Lloyd and Ben Sears. Available through ClimbingWyoming.com, Fixed Pin Publishers and Wild Iris Mountain Shop, $29.95. Contains info on over a dozen areas comprising 500 boulder problems in the Lander region. Peppered with photos, the 200 full-color pages come in a sewn binding that allows the book to lie open.

Meanwhile, from California has emerged the first-ever comprehensive book to the Sierras’ Shuteye Ridge, with 400-plus pages packed with information on great climbing—of all grades—that few climbers know about. One area, for example, notes the book’s publisher, Dave Pegg of Wolverine Publishing, is a “gorgeous” 600-foot wall of multi-pitch moderates, which only saw its first recorded ascent in 2011. He says, “There's a lot more like this in Shuteye and the book.”

• Shuteye Ridge, by Grahm Doe, www.wolverinepublishing.com, $40.
A full-color guide, and the first comprehensive one, to more than 800 routes in 60 areas along this aesthetic ridge in California’s Western Sierra.

• Chattsteel, by Micah Gentry, www.rockerypress.com, $39.99. To be published in late September. Will contain information on 80 percent of Chattanooga's sport-climbing routes in a 50-mile radius around the city. Route info, logistics, history, 432 color pages. Includes the first published guide for the Deep Creek area, with more than 100 new routes in an amazing setting along the Cumberland Trail, just a short drive from the Chattanooga area.

• Yosemite Bigwalls, by Erik Sloan and Roger Putnam, yosemitebigwall.com. Publication date is expected to be Dec. 1, 2013(ebook). Print book will be in stores May 1, 2014. Writes Sloan: “This is a massive community effort to collect all the new and updated route info for big-wall routes in Yosemite. The last comprehensive-style guidebook to Yosemite walls, Big Walls by Don Reid (published in 1993, out of print since 2000), contained 152 different routes. Our current route-list projects us to have more than 350 topos. Please send any info to erik@yosemitebigwall.com.”

• Best climbs of Tasmania, by Gerry Narkowicz. Available in December at outdoor stores in Australia or through www.osp.com.au (Open Spaces Publishing), or direct from the author for discount at narkowiczg@lcs.tas.edu.au, $49.95 Australian / $44.95 USD. The guidebook offers a selected best climbs to Tasmania, an island south of Australia, home to the world-famous sea stack of Totem Pole. The guide describes 850 climbs at 25 cliffs, and includes remote big walls, sport climbing, the best crack climbs in Australia and the best sea-cliff climbing in Australia. Tasmania is the perfect summer climbing destination Down Under when Arapiles and other mainland crags are too hot.

• The Needles Climbing, A Complete Guide, by Kristian Solem, from Kevin Daniels Publishing, website TBA. Publication is expected next spring. Book is to include logistics and route info for The Needles, Dome Rock and Hermit Spire.

• New River Gorge Rock Climbs, Second Edition, Volumes 1 and 2, by Mike Williams, www.wolverinepublishing.com, sale price $50 (down from $60) for both. Two-volume color guidebook to the truly endless climbs of the New River Gorge, West Virginia. Volume 1 covers the New River Gorge, Volume 2 (264 pages) comprises the Meadow River Gorge, Summersville Lake and Gauley River region; 696 pages in total.